When Daniel Lanigan was growing up, the beer in the fridge was usually Keystone Light. When he was old enough to drink, Lanigan realized he didn’t have a taste for cheap American lagers, so he became “a Guinness guy.”

That changed during a visit he made years ago to a brewpub in Brattleboro. The pub didn’t serve the Irish staple, and offered Lanigan its own craft-brewed stout instead.

“The rest is history,” says Lanigan, proprietor of the Lord Hobo beer bistro outside Inman Square in Cambridge, where he presides over an ever-changing draft beer menu from Trillium, Jack’s Abby, and other local standouts.

In recent years, the 37-year-old publican — who was born in Everett and went to high school in Ipswich — has helped open similar craft-beer bars in New York and Baltimore. Now he is ready for a new challenge. Lanigan is preparing to build what he says will be the country’s first brewery entirely devoted to contract brewing: the making and packaging of beer to meet the exacting specifications of commercial clients.